Major new grant on forecasting personal health for Dr. Richard Clayton

Dr. Richard Clayton has received a major £1.5 million grant from EPSRC for a new project on forecasting personal health in an uncertain environment. The project will provide funding for scientists in Sheffield, Manchester, and Brunel to develop new ways to handle noise and uncertainty in models of healthcare.

Recent advances in medical imaging and computing power have enabled detailed models of human organ systems to be developed, and these can reconstruct the function observed in patients. However, a key feature of disease progression in a particular individual is uncertainty. Some patients present to their doctor following their first symptom, whereas others may wait until their disease is more advanced. Some patients are large, and some are small. Some respond to treatment, while others don't.

The aim of this project is to develop generic tools that can be used to embed different types of uncertainty within models at different spatial scales ranging from cells to individuals. These tools will benefit from lessons learned in other applications including weather forecasting and oil exploration.

Dr. Clayton says:

"We will test our ideas in two exemplar diseases, infection of the lung with influenza, and a chronic heart condition called atrial fibrillation. Both of these involve uncertainty in the anatomical structure, which varies from one patient to another, and also uncertainty at smaller scales, which influence the disease progression.

This work will offer new insights into disease progression in the heart and lungs. More generally, it is a step towards being able to forecast the personal health of an individual using a computer model, in the same way that computer models of the atmosphere are used to forecast the weather."

For more information, see Richard Clayton's web site.